


shift

by malapropism



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Non-Magical, Queer Character, Queer Themes, Trans Character, Trans Male Character, Trans Remus, Transgender
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-08
Updated: 2014-09-08
Packaged: 2018-02-16 15:29:48
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,327
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2274966
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/malapropism/pseuds/malapropism
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which Remus Lupin is a extraordinary boy in an ordinary world. A non-magical, modern AU account of how the Lupin family navigates the childhood of their trans son, from birth to eighteen.</p>
            </blockquote>





	shift

**Author's Note:**

> All ends well in this story, but the journey does deal with the feelings of two parents who love their child very much, but who also take a little bit of time to swallow their fear. 
> 
> And, this story wouldn't actually exist except in my mind without [stripeyjumpers](http://archiveofourown.org/users/stripeyjumpers), who encouraged me to ramble about the characters and gave me the idea of how to finish the story when I got stuck.

He wasn’t the daughter they expected.

 _Baby Lupin_ read the plastic band snugly tied around their newborn’s thin wrist, because even by Hope’s due date, they hadn’t decided on a name. Born early, their baby was all ribs and swollen, watchful eyes. During the delivery, Hope sunk her fingernails deep into the skin of her husband’s palm; Lyall showed off the crescent-moon scars for years, smiling wryly about the day his wife drew his blood. He didn’t mention that he had clung to her hand just as tightly in the moments after the doctor severed the umbilical cord, in those staggering moments of silence, while they waited for the first cry, the first whimper, the first _something_. Because their baby’s skin was ashen, lungs still, eyes wide-open but unseeing. Because they knew what happened to babies that didn’t breathe.

An eternity stretched, scratched into Lyall’s palms and etched onto Hope’s brow, before their baby roared to life. Oxygen flooded the lungs, sending color coursing through the veins, blushing into the skin. Hope let go of Lyall’s hand only when the nurse held out a baby wrapped in pink to place in her arms. 

Pink for a girl. Pink for a daughter.

Hope and Lyall Lupin brought their baby home, and when they filled out the birth certificate, they wrote _Rhea Lupin_.

 

Five-years-old and still quiet, too-quiet. Eyes brown like loamy earth, ringed with honey, always watching. Always alone in the schoolyard, watching the girls tying daisy chains in the yard, watching the boys running rabid around the fence, watching the teacher who watches back. 

Six-years-old and begging to hear about Artemis, goddess of the hunt and the wild, the favorite pages in a well-worn copy of Edith Hamilton’s _Mythology_ , because she seems like she’s _free._ When Hope asks, “Free from what?”, there’s no answer. Or rather, there aren’t words to describe that weight, not yet. 

Seven-years-old and it’s time for a new bicycle. Lyall brings home a sparkling pink contraption, and Hope proclaims it “a big girl’s bicycle for our big girl!” The bicycle gathers dust for two months before Lyall’s frustration wears thin and he insists on a Sunday afternoon outing, which ends jaggedly with Hope holding back tears as they race to the hospital, a broken bone jutting out from a seven-year-old leg, and a broken pink bicycle left for the ancient trees. 

Eight-years-old and no one comes to the birthday party.

Nine-years-old when all of the dresses disappear underneath the bed.

Ten-years-old with a pair of scissors, a clogged sink, and a sheep-shorn head. Lyall and Hope stay up all night, whispering fearfully, wondering why their baby, always so quiet and sweet and gentle, brought blades so close.

Eleven-years-old and throwing up in the kitchen sink after Hope explains puberty.

Twelve-years-old and it feels like the entire world fits too tight around the ribs, too heavy on the hips. Swollen. Loose shirts fall like empty sails, gaps growing between bones and valleys curving into cheeks. A body caving in. A body caving under pressure. A body, a cave.

Thirteen-years-old when he finally says it.

 

Later, Hope and Lyall will tell themselves that they shouldn’t have been surprised, that they should have seen this coming, that they should have said something sooner. Because later, Hope and Lyall will feel their hearts’ crack to think about how long their baby hurt. But at first, in this moment, their eyes are blown wide by shock and their stomachs drop like a ship’s ballast set loose on the sea.

“What do you mean, Rhea?” Hope had said slowly, voice leaden with fear and confusion.

Winces at the sound of the name. Shivers at the precipice of it all.

“Whatever it is, it’s - it can be okay,” Lyall said, choked and rough and quiet.

“There’s something wrong with me,” their child said in a voice that did not shake. “I’m not like the girls at school, and I don’t want to be. I’m not a girl. I can’t be.”

Thirteen-years-old but newborn.

 

Hope and Lyall falter, at first. Slips of the tongue, slips into she and her and daughter, words familiar and foreign all at the same time, now that they know their _baby girl_ is the _baby boy_ he has always been. 

They huddle around the kitchen table at night, when they think he is sleeping. They whisper, but he can hear, he is sitting at the top of the stairs.

“What do we do? Should we go to the doctor?”

“What doctor? Her - his - fuck - the pediatrician? Christ…”

“I read about this, on the Internet - I looked up - _transgender_ -“

“I mean, I knew people at university like - like this? But they were older, and she’s so young.”

“Maybe it’s because she reads so much? All the books, we kept bringing them all home, maybe they were too much, maybe she wasn’t ready? She’s always been so precocious, and we encouraged that…Maybe she got the idea from a book, all those male protagonists in literature, maybe it’s just a phase, some way of identifying - ”

“You think that _books_ made this happen?”

“I don’t know. How am I supposed to know?”

“I don’t know.”

A week passes, and the household vibrates at a raw frequency. Every encounter around the curve of a hallway ignites a shock of electricity; the breakfast table is a power plant suspended at the moment before implosion. Everyone tries to be quiet, to whisper, to tread lightly, and perversely, the effect is a total magnification of sound. Everything roars in the dead air.

Hope and Lyall watch their ghost-child slip in and out of the shadows, pale and so-too-thin and tired, and Hope feels a kind of dull ache at the spot where she had once been connected by flesh and blood to her baby, who is so very far away now. 

He says nothing to his parents in the abyss of that week. Everything hurts, and he wishes that he could gobble the words back down his throat, take them all back, not because it isn’t true, but because he feels like he has lost something in the telling. Like something has been ripped from between his ribs and he’s got a hole inside, and there’s nothing he can do to plaster up the damage. He looks into his parents’ eyes and all he sees is the hurt and concern and fear and he wonders, _is that disgust, too? there, in the back of the eyes, in the twitch of the mouth, in the tightening of the fingers?_ And it is horrible, because when he looks in the mirror, _that is what he sees_.

Time hangs like a prison sentence.

And then, when the the clocks chime the end of the schoolday, the end of the week, something slackens. The house cannot hold itself up by its angles anymore; the family can no longer hold its breath. They exhale.

“I always wanted a son,” Lyall says quietly at the dinner table. “I just didn’t know I already had one. It’s all going to be okay. It’s all going to be fine. Because we love you. You.”

 

Lyall takes his _son_ to the barber the next day, because nothing else seems possible, and because a smile cracks the sadness etched onto that ancient thirteen-year-old face when the mirror finally shows his reflection.

Hope takes her _son_ shopping. Money is tight but they splurge, because the cut of the dark blue denim is just _right_ and even though the brown wool sweater is a size too big, she can’t say no, because it matches his eyes. Perfectly.

Together, they go to their son’s school that Monday.

 

The night before, another dinner table tableau: 

“Rhe - I mean - oh, I’m sorry, dear.”

“Yes, mum?”

“Have you - is there something else you’d like to be called? A name that…suits you better?”

That morning, Hope and Lyall had laid in bed and whispered about this, this change that seemed the most monumental, the death of the name they had so carefully selected for their daughter. But they could tell how ill-fitting _Rhea_ was for the boy now illuminated, and another search for help on the Internet revealed that this time, they wouldn’t be naming their child. He would name himself.

When it appears that no response is forthcoming, and the scraping of silver on china becomes unbearable, Lyall adds, “We’re going to go to your school tomorrow, like we talked about this morning. To sort the uniform kit and all. And if you want, we’d like to - if you’re ready, that is - we’d like to tell them what to call you.”

“Yes, I’ve thought about it. For a while, actually.”

Hope and Lyall wait.

“Remus.”

Something brightens and lifts in the air. 

 

Hope had studied classics at university. She had loved the honeyed names of the gods and goddesses, beautiful in any tongue. But her favorite story had been that of the founding of Rome, of the woman who had born the part-divine twin sons, of the founding of a civilization in the blood of a slain brother. The tragedy of the story and the uncertainties of its varied accounts appealed to Hope; the myth’s prescient promise of strife for the great city was captivating.

Hope and Lyall had not been able to agree on a name for their new daughter in the months before the birth, and they left the hospital with an unnamed infant wrapped tightly in a pink blanket. But as they crossed their threshold for the first time as _three_ instead of _two_ , the name sprang to Lyall’s lips.

“Rhea,” he said reverently, and Hope smiled.

Bedtime stories were mythological tales of monsters and men, of gods and goddesses spurred by vengeance, of the fantastical creation of the world as it is. Best of all, Hope loved to recite the tale of Remus and Romulus, and of the woman who gave birth to the twins, and the wolf who raised them, and the discovery of their true nature, and the beginning of Rome and the ending of Remus.

Neither Hope nor her child spared much favor for Romulus, the brother-slayer in their preferred account of the myth. Romulus had won a city, had given his name to the world. But Remus, Remus was an untold story.

 

“Remus,” Hope whispers. “Remus.”

 

The air in their town had turned to gravel in their throats, because Remus was something new and different and thus _monstrous and terrible_ in the eyes of their neighbors. No matter how furiously Hope snarled at teachers who wrote her son up for uniform violations, no matter how much information Lyall patiently gathered from the Internet to educate those who cruelly shut their eyes, nothing seemed to get any better. And you can’t raise a soft-hearted boy in the hard, bitter mouth of that kind of hatred.

So they moved at the end of the school year, to another little town on the coast, to a fresh start. And by the time Remus turned seventeen, they would move again, and again, and again. Sometimes, they were going toward something - to be closer to a new doctor, to better-paying jobs for Hope and Lyall. Sometimes, they were running away from something, from someone. 

But when Remus is seventeen, they stop running, because they have finally found somewhere to rest, where no one questions the quiet boy with the wide amber eyes.

Hope’s hair starts to go grey, and Lyall has to pick up extra work tutoring some of his students, and there is more to worry about and money is still tight. But they are happy, the mother and the father and their son.

 

Remus is eighteen, now, and he is packing up his suitcase. He is going to university.

His voice is low and soft and rushes like the wind through tall reeds. His chest is smooth and flat and he is wearing his favorite pair of faded jeans, which hang off hips that he is still learning to love, but it is okay. The light from his bedroom window shatters across wire-framed glasses.

Remus is going to university in the city. London, at last. He’s tired of the quiet coastal towns and he is ready to see something else, to be somewhere else, and to maybe find people who are like him.

Remus has learned how to blend into the background of his environment, how to get by without drawing attention, and he’s tired of that, too. He has always made friends easily, but he has never let them come too close, and he wants to be closer to living.

Hope cried when Remus decided to go to university in London. Lyall smiled sadly, because he had always known that his son would leave, one day. 

Remus is tired of hiding in the pages of his books; he is tired of being careful with himself. He is tired of walking like a secret.

For a long time, Remus thought that he wanted to pass unnoticed in the world. He wanted to rewrite the mistake of birth that had brought him into this body, and to never mention it again. He wanted to be _normal_ , because he was tired of being _different_. When they moved to this last town, when he finally saw _himself_ reflected back in strangers’ eyes, he was happy and he thought that this could be forever.

But now, Remus isn’t so sure, because he wants more. He feels like there’s fire in his veins, like he’s made out of stardust, like he is a shapeshifter. And he wants to live like one. 

He dreams about kissing boys with flowers in their hair. He dreams about wearing glitter on his lips. He dreams about living in his skin and stepping out of his fear. He dreams about meeting someone who will ask him about his name, his strange and wondrous name, and telling the story of how he got it.


End file.
